Knoyleo wrote:I get what Orange means that resting feels like it goes against the role playing aspect, especially very early on, because you've got this imminent ticking time bomb in your head, so casually taking a break to have a nap and move a day ahead feels like it should be a real risk, and the best thing to do is progress as far as you possibly can before resting and potentially getting turned into a zombie. The game does a poor job of tutorialising the idea of resting in this regard. Admittedly it doesn't take too long for the story to start suggesting that your imminent threat isn't quite so imminent, but it never explicitly says long resting is fine and your head won't explode, and there's at least one companion who continues to bang on about how urgent your current predicament is regardless.
My thoughts at maybe a dozen or fifteen hours in (Steam says 19, but includes time spent paused where I've stepped away or been messing with mods) are pretty close to OR's. I'm not my sure how I'm that much playtime in but feel like I've barely made any progress. I guess avoiding combat whenever I can see it and going to do all the other stuff doesn't help, but it's not what I want to spend my playtime doing tbh. I've had a few moments here and there where it feels like something clicks, but then the next encounter is totally different and I just ends up going back to using big standard melee or ranged attacks to chip a bit of health off whatever generic enemies are in front of me and it all feels a bit tedious. I'm sure there should be more interesting spells and combos available, but I'm not sure how to enable them or use them more than once. Especially frustrating is when you have a new spell or something that you want to use, the die roll fails, and then it's locked out until you rest again, also wasting a turn. It just incentives relying on the highest % chance of success, which is typically stand next to them and wallop with sword. Given that even pretty basic looking enemies end up taking several successful strikes to down, it ends up feeling a bit attritious.
Might have to step away from this for a bit, as it clearly doesn't suit playing in short irregular busts. Not sure when I'll ever get round to making the time to play it properly, mind.
20 hours in I feel the same as you, sometimes I wipe up enemies with ease other times I feel like Im set up to fail. My melee centric characters start missing 80% hit chances (even 3 in the same turn with a action surge) and I start to get frustrated.
I am still making progress. I should have just started Act 2 now
(through the elevator from the grymforge) I still had an epic fight in which I managed to turn the tides by using some strategy that did raise a big smile on my face.
So I reached the Last Light Inn, some creatures came in flying from the roof to abduct the person that should have helped me, tried to fend them off, killed Marcus, but the others managed to surround her and took her away, tried another time, and the same happened, so I feel that that is the way this supposed to go. After that everyone got turned into an enemy, they just kept spawning from everywhere, and big trees started popping up wiping out my whole squad. I have only Astarion left so I get on the roof fire some fire sphere scrolls and firebolts at the trees and any other wooden staff to cause widespread fires and manage to decimate the opponents. Then I kind of glitched it, as the enemy got confused and started going inside the building I was on top of, but did not bother going up, so they kept going in and out and when they went out they were easy targets, as I had the advantage and they couldn't hit me.
So Astarion ended up as my unlikely hero, then I returned to camp quickly and resurrected all my fallen team. I like how when you manage to turn the tide in combat the music changes to a more upbeat tune, just a little touch which makes a good move much more satisfactory.